ABSTRACT
Contemporary black politics must still grapple with George Santayana’s admonition that our failure to learn history only dooms us to repeat it. Mindful of how history can repeat itself in both the practice and praxis of black politics, this symposium takes seriously the claim by Persons (1999) that black political science confronts a “malaise” and thus needs fresh intellectual blood. In a 1999 National Political Science Review editorial essay, Persons asserts: “the study and the practice of black politics in America has reached a state of seeming inertia. There is very little which is new in terms of theory building or engaging analyses on the part of scholars” (1993:3). Nine years earlier Mack Jones sanguinely echoes Persons concern when he concludes black political science, “has yet to get beyond it most rudimentary stage” (Jones 1990). Furthermore, Persons feels that absent a critical re-examination of this malaise, “analysts of black politics, especially black analysts, endlessly lament what they see as the lack of purpose in black politics as an actual practice” (1993:3). Robert Smith’s We Have No Leaders, now ten years old, is among the best exemplars of this intellectual cynicism (Persons 1999a; Smith 1996). Persons attributes the above analytical and actual stupor to two failures. First, scholars and practitioners fail to grasp changing political conditions and to adapt by creating appropriately new analytical lens as well as realpolitik strategies and tactics. Second, the lack of innovative approaches to American racial politics and black politics inhibits our ability to derive useful comparative lens for understanding dominant-subordinate politics outside as well as inside the United States. Interestingly, Persons wrote these words in 1999 when Cathy Cohen published her book The Boundaries of Black Blackness: Aids and the Breakdown of Black Politics.
